Cerrito Azul is a school for disabled children in Lima, Peru
About 120 kids and teenager from mostly low income families study in Cerrito Azul
Facilities, rent, salaries and all other costs are covered by donations.
Mainly kids with autism and some with down syndrom go to Cerrito Azul.
Facilities are very basic. This is one of the better WC.
Peru was one of the countries in Latin America that suffered the highest number of cases of Covid-19.
With teachers of the Hans Thoma School in Oberursel we organized a digital brainstorming on a possible hygiene concept for Cerrito Azul.
Devolping a hygiene concept for Cerrito Azul – a school for disabled children in Lima
In 2019 we met Mariana Vidal from BluoVerda Deutschland e.V. through the recommendation of one of our Summer Academy participants. Mariana is Peruvian, she lives since ten years in Dresden and holds a doctoral degree from the TU Dresden. Together with other friends, most of them from Latin Americaand also specialist in natural resource management, she founded BluoVerda which supports and initiates environmental projects in South America. BluoVerda’s philosophy and approach, and of course it’s pool of founders and members who all are fantastically trained experts, made it a perfect partner to Weltweit e.V.
In 2020 we started our first project together that was an online workshop on Geographic Information Systems for project monitoring. Shortly after Mariana proposed to apply for some funding support that would help Cerrito Azul to overcome the Corona crisis. Cerrito Azul is a school for disabled children in Lima and Mariana knew the founder Jorge from her childhood days. Both went to the Humboldt School in Lima, Peru, and ever since kept regular contact. The initiation of this project was therefore an affair of the heart, but one that followed our main principle of success: personal insights.
A life work in support of children with disabilities. Over the past 28 years, Jorge Paredes, founder of Cerrito Azul, has adapted four buildings donated by the church or private sources into a primary and secondary school, a workshop and an orphan house. The schools allow that more than 120 children with disabilities (autism and down syndrome) can receive an education. The orphans’ house is currently home of seven young adults/teenagers (between 15 and 30 years old) with disabilities that live at the Cerrito Azul Center permanently.
Our organisations are helping Cerrito Azul, whereby Bluoverda Deutschland e.V. supports Weltweit in educating students and teachers about, as well as providing them with, hygiene equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic. In close collaboration with Jorge and his colleague Mariella we designed numerous posters for the school to create awareness on how to wash hands and keep social distance, as well as provide the equipment to do so.
On top of that, we had contact with the Hans-Thoma Schule, a school for children with disabilities in Oberursel, Germany. Dedicated teachers from this school shared their experiences with Jorge and Mariella and thereby inspired them greatly on how a hygiene concept that effectively contains the virus should look like. Ideally, this productive first contact of both schools will develop into a long lasting partnership.
despite the chaotic situation that COVID-19 has caused, a lot of things have happened in the first half of this year. We have tried to report about most of it in our Newsletter that came out end of July.
A ‚healthy‘ and productive farming plot in Maputos‘ agricultural green belt
A salt affected and hence unproductive plot
A plot that has been abandoned due to salinity related degradation
Bad drainage locally often associated with salinity
Cultivation of salt tolerant beetroot is one of the few local coping strategies
Matias and Jakob taking soil samples
Matias and Jakob taking soil samples
Participatory
Agronomic Research:
Tackling the Salinity
Issue of Maputo’s peri-urban Vegetable Farmers
„Piloting of Strategies to Mitigate Impacts of
Salinity in Horticultural Systems of Mozambique“
The idea to this project evolved some time
back, in 2018 when Jakob and Matias conducted an exploratory field study on the
prevailing issue of soil salinity within the peri-urban vegetable producing
areas in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Jakob, one of our newest members at
Weltweit, is a recent graduate of the master course ‘Agriculture and Resource
Management in the Tropics and Subtropics‘ from
the University of Bonn. University contacts led him to Maputo and the
‘University Eduardo Mondlande’ (UEM), Mozambique’s most renowned educational
institution, to realise his masters project. Its objective was to explore the
causes, extent, and local perception of soil salinity within Maputo’s
peri-urban vegetable production areas. The 10.000 plus farmers who cultivate
the local coastal lowlands are ensuring the city’s supply with fresh vegetable
produce. Unfortunately, they are constrained in their farming activities by
several agronomic problems. While high pest pressure, unfavourable precipitation
patterns (exacerbated by climate change effects) and constrained access to
adequate farming inputs are rather well known and understood challenges, soil
salinity is a hitherto hardly studied issue.
Jakob, in his research efforts, not only
enjoyed crucial supervision by the ‘Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry
Engineering’ of the UEM, but received equally strong support from Matias,
representing the ‘Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and
Extension’ (DAPPE) of the Municipality of Maputo as its technical coordinator.
Matias initially introduced Jakob to the local farmer organisations and its
members, and eventually even became an active research partner, helping shape
the study. He holds a Master degree in Soil Science from the University of
Lavras in Brazil and has worked for DAPPE for 8 years. During this time, he has
kept a foot in the field of agricultural sciences; having participated in
several research projects as a consultant and working as a part time lecturer.
Jakob’s and Matia’s study, which was finally
concluded in 2019, revealed that soil salinity indeed constitutes a major
constraint to Maputo’s agricultural system. The local causes for salinization
are complex; including hydrological mismanagement, urbanisation, sea-level rise
and climate change aspects. Farmers are struggling with declining yields,
complete degradation and loss of formerly agriculturally used land, along with
a lack of capacity to sustainably manage the salinity problem. Looking for
practical solutions to that dilemma, Jakob and Matias realised, however, that
relevant application oriented agricultural research on salinity in the context
of vegetable production is practically nonexistent. The vast available
literature is restricted to fundamental research, mostly conducted in
controlled greenhouse environments, and thus is barely geared towards direct
applicability in smallholder farming contexts. Nonetheless, it indicates a
large pool of potential agronomic solutions, including i.e. improved irrigation
management (e.g. drip irrigation systems), mulching, adapted application
patterns of composts, manures and conventional fertilizes, biofertilizer
formulations, use of alternative salt tolerant crops, adapted cropping patterns
and rotations. This realization constituted the actual starting point of our
project. Jakob and Matias were interested in experimenting with management
approaches as suggested by the pertinent literature and eventually identifying
practical solutions adapted to the local farming realities.
Since then they forged ahead with turning this
idea into reality. Following the elaboration of a detailed project plan, they
looked for the right institutional partnerships and eventually brought together
a consortium of 4 specialized institutions. DAPPE as the main implementing
institution will be locally supported by ABIODES, a Mozambican NGO experienced
in offering agro-ecological extension services to farmers, as well as the
‘Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering’ of the UEM. Weltweit assumes a
coordinating function, supporting the project in terms of fundraising, public
relations and the like. These initial efforts have been fruitful and we are
looking forward to the project start in September 2020; grateful for the confirmed
financial support of the ‘Conservation, Food & Health Foundation’ and the
‘Hand-in-Hand Fonds’.
In a nutshell, the principal objective of the
project is to make the vast theoretical knowledge that exists on soil salinity
and vegetable production tangible, and to put it into action. The project aims
at a highly participatory approach and follows a modular logic. At the centre
stands the combined realisation of Farmer Field Schools and scientific field
trials. The idea is to actively involve representatives of the local farming
community in the research and experimentation process. They will help select
the agronomic approaches to be tested, take care of the experimental sites, and
critically evaluate the experiments’ outcome. At the same time, the involvement
of the UEM will ensure scientific tenability. Ideally, the project will lead to
the identification and dissemination of feasible solutions for the local
farming community, and concurrently generate generalizable scientific insights,
thus contributing to pertinent international research and extension efforts. As
a complementary module, the acquisition of modern mobile soil sensing equipment
and the establishment of a GIS-based salinity monitoring system is envisaged.
Such a system will allow the local authorities henceforth to make better
informed land management decisions within Maputo’s valuable agricultural green
belt.
The objective is to conduct the project’s experimental activities over several successive years and growing seasons; regularly informing here on its progress and milestones.
Mohamed Jah has recently written to us some news concerning his renewable energy project, the village conflict in his project area and his managerial response to Corona.
The registration period for our Summer Acacdemy is open now until the 7th of August. See the Flyer and apply via the link below. The programm is massive, don’t get scared:
Together with our Partnerorganisation BluoVerda e.V. we are organizing a digital workshop on open source GIS software (QGIS and OpenForis) starting on the 24. of June.
From 8th to 11th of September we are taking part in the workshop organization about Social Entrepreneurship. It is planned to be held physically in Duisburg. The host and main organizer is the Life Learning Development e.V.
In the winter semester 2019/20, together with Prof. Christian Hähnlein and Fabian Riemenschneider, we offered a module for the Studium Generale at the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, in which we discussed and worked on the water project in Tanzania.The students got an insight into the living situation of the rural population of Tanzania and an understanding of the complexity of the development project work.
Through our first project experience we realized that the Universities teach a cutting edge science but this science remains theory as the students are not taught how to turn it into practice. Hands-on tools and practical methods to manage a project are not part of the curriculum at most uni programmes.
In 2018 we therefore started to organize workshops on project managment. We invite experience lecturers while some of the topics we already feel confident enough to teach ourselves. All workshops given so far by us and together with our partner organisation from the Action Network are listed below, including the evaluations from the participants.
The main target group for our trainings are of course also international students. As for the M&E workshops we are working on a system where we match the participants with projects in their home countries. The students become junior evaluators through the skills taught by us and then get the assignment to evaluate the projects from other organisations.
5 days challenge based workshop on climate change for youth age 12-16 in Hofheim, August 2020, in partnership with 2811, GeWissenSchaffen, Ecokids, Clèment Stiftung
Cerrito Azul is a school for disabled children in Lima, Peru
